Bald Billboards

Air New Zealand is offering to pay bald travelers to stand in lines in three airports — while wearing temporary tattoos on the back of their heads so the displays can be seen by people lining up behind them.

The airline would pay $660 for each walking billboard, a company official said.

The tattoos will promote a new system that is meant to reduce check-in waiting times.

Air New Zealand marketing manager Steve Bayliss described the campaign as "a bit of fun."

"It's a ... tattoo on the back of someone's head, so they have to have their head shaved or be bald already," he told National Radio on Wednesday. "It will be an advantage for them to be bald already."

The tattoos would fade or wash off after about two weeks, he said.

Pearl Jam

Lebanese restaurant owner Raymond Salha and his wife were having oysters for lunch when she made a stunning discovery — a cluster of 26 pearls inside an oyster on her plate.

The find 10 days ago at his Al-Fanar Restaurant in the southern port city of Tyre was a "total surprise," Salha told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

It was one of about 200 oysters they had cooked that day at the restaurant. As his wife opened the shell, she gasped and said, "Look at this oyster, there are lots of pearls in it," Salha recounted.

The couple immediately believed the pearls were valuable, so Salha called the city's maritime museum which sent a team that took the oyster — and the pearls still inside it — away for testing.

At the museum, Salha said officials later told him they counted "only" 25 pearls. He insisted however, that he and his wife Amal counted a total of 26 pearls of varying sizes inside the oyster, some very small.

A few days later, the oyster was preserved and returned by the museum, along with the pearls. Salha, who insists the oyster still contains 26 pearls, plans to keep it on display at his restaurant. (AP)

Don Gorske, 54, says he hit the milestone last month, continuing a pleasurable obsession that began May 17, 1972 after he got his first car.

So how did Gorske keep a tally of the Big Macs? He kept every receipt in a box. He says he was always fascinated with numbers, and watching McDonald's track its number of customers motivated him to track his own consumption.

The only day he skipped a Big Mac was the day his mother died, to respect her request.

An 8-foot-tall mechanical gorilla swiped from a Maine store was found in a cornfield hundreds of miles away after an apologetic ransom demand turned up on YouTube.

"Seemore," as in "See More at Sandy's Sales," vanished during the Labor Day weekend. The gorilla's creator, Ken Booth of the Gorilla Robot Factory in Akron, Ohio, helped out by posting a YouTube video seeking the gorilla's return and offering a reward.

But that same day, another video surfaced on YouTube, showing a hooded person demanding a $1 million ransom and apologizing for his crimes.

Following in your father's footsteps by attending the same university is one thing. But moving into the same dorm room as your dad?

Mike Robell has found himself in B310 in Emmons Hall at Michigan State University — the very same room occupied by his father in 1978.

What are the odds? The East Lansing university has about 8,000 rooms.

The freshman's father, Rich Robell, 50, said he suspected it was his old room. It has the same floor and same wall color. The phone number is the same, too. The same broken window latch offered some key evidence.

The proof came from a university archivist, who located a 1978 student directory.

Housing complex manager Tim Knight says it's the first time in his 37-year tenure that he's aware of a parent and child having the same room by chance. (AP)

Corpse Sellers Arrested in Cremation Murder Trade

Seven members of a Chinese gang in Puning, Guangdong province, have been arrested in connection with the murder of 100 disabled or elderly people whose corpses were sold for cremation to families who wanted to bury their loved ones, the South China Morning Post reported.

Mainland China outlawed the several-thousand-year-old burial tradition in the 1950s and enforced cremation to save on farmland, a move many blame for the rise in the black-market corpse for cremation trade.

Wealthy people who want to respect their loved ones by burying the bodies will buy corpses of murder victims to cremate, replacing their relatives' bodies, a police spokesman told the South China Morning Post. The family will later bury the real body according to traditional customs.

A Puning Public Security Bureau spokesman who declined to give his name told the South China Morning Post that the suspects are being interrogated and the case is still under investigation.

The suspects would reportedly trail victims, usually mentally disabled or elderly, drag them into vehicles in remote areas and either strangle or poison them.

Corpses would be sold for approximately $1,500 each and substituted for cremation.

A debate is raging in Australia over whether playing the long, hollow didgeridoo can lead to female infertility.

The Australian edition of "The Daring Book for Girls" recommends, and advises girls how to play the traditionally Aboriginal musical instrument. But the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association says the instructions to girls are not only culturally insensitive, they’re putting girls’ health at risk.

"We know very clearly that there's a range of consequences for a female touching a didgeridoo — infertility would be the start of it,” the Aboriginal association’s manager says. "I won't even let my daughter touch one."

He said the didgeridoo, an integral part of many Aboriginal rituals, was "definitely a men's business ceremonial tool,” and added that a book teaching girls how to play it should be “pulped.”